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Editorial: Voting Rights Act still an absolute necessity

President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a ceremony in the President's Room near the Senate Chambers on Capitol Hill in Washington. Three years ago, the Supreme Court warned there could be constitutional problems with a landmark civil rights law that has opened voting booths to millions of African-Americans. Now, opponents of a key part of the Voting Rights Act are asking the high court to finish that provision off. Surrounding the president from left directly above his right hand, Vice President Hubert Humphrey; House Speaker John McCormack; Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y.; first daughter Luci Johnson; and Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill. Behind Humphrey is House Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma; and behind Celler is Sen. Carl Hayden, D-Ariz.
(Photo by Associated Press file)

When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, opponents, many of them Southern segregationists in the Senate, said their concerns were rooted in the Constitution. Such a federal law, they said, would be an unwelcome federal incursion, an affront to the rights of the sovereign states.

That had also been their argument eight years earlier, when Congress passed the first civil rights legislation in 82 years.

Now, all these years later, though the segregationists are but a historical artifact, their arguments are still with us. A group advocating elimination of parts of the 1965 law, maintaining that they are no longer necessary, also asserts that the landmark civil rights measure puts the federal government on terrain that ought solely to belong to the states.

There’s so much wrong with this so-called reasoning that one barely knows where to begin.

First, the states-rights argument is as transparent now as it was in the run-up to the Civil War. Those shouting about the states were blowing smoke back then, and they are doing the very same thing today.

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to back those arguments, to believe that parts of the Voting Rights Act are no longer necessary.

To believe that is to argue, in effect, that there is no longer any racism in our nation. After all, some suggest, doesn’t the election of a black man as president, and his re-election four years later, prove that the earlier laws are no longer needed?

In a word, no.

Look at the strict voter ID laws some states recently put into place. And at efforts to end early voting before the just-passed election. Both show the cold, harsh truth: Those who would seek to suppress the vote of minorities are still with us.